Death From The Sky In Alaska

July 25, 1986|By Edward Flattau, who writes an environmental-affairs column from Washington.

The Interior Department is supposed to be the chief protector of the nation`s wildlife. But listening to Assistant Interior Secretary Bill Horn defend the slaughter of a shrinking and highly stressed wolf population in Alaska by airborne hunters makes you wonder just how seriously the department takes its responsibility.

Aerial sports hunting was banned by federal law in the early 1970s, so a technique that is nothing more than a blatant circumvention of the prohibition is now the vogue in Alaska.

The technique is called ``land-and-shoot`` trapping. You can`t directly mow down wolves from an airplane. But you can, for $10, obtain a permit that allows you to spot the creatures from the air, drive them to exhaustion from on high, and then land and shoot all the animals you want.

Nary a trap is ever involved in this process, and even many of the participants admit they are engaging in the practice purely for the sport.

That the Interior Department is willing to tolerate this deliberate flouting of federal law is bad enough. It`s even more reprehensible given the declining wolf population in Alaska--from about 15,000 a decade ago to around 5,500 now.

In some areas, moose and caribou have multiplied dramatically while wolves have declined, thereby contradicting some hunters` assertions that the canine predator must continue to have its ranks thinned because of the threat posed to hoofed game.

If anything, the wolf, which is an important cog in the Alaskan wilderness ecosystem, desperately needs an armistice with man.

Horn could ban ``land-and-shoot`` trapping of wolves on all national wildlife refuges, which represent a hefty chunk of Alaskan wilderness. He could lobby Alaskan officials to follow suit on state-owned lands.

He should be leading an effort to compile more precise data on Alaskan wolf populations in order to determine if endangered species protection is warranted, as many suspect is the case.